Tuesday, January 08, 2013

The US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in Rockville, Maryland, received 419 allegations of misconduct at institutions in 2012 — nearly double the number in 2011, says David Wright, director of the ORI. Wright puts much of this down to software that has made it easier for watchdogs to detect possible plagiarism or image manipulation in publications. “We now get allegations from all over the world,” he says.

The climate conversation in and of itself has verged on a stale sterility, with the same bad actors making the same bad points–from Mann and Gleick on one end to Monckton and Morano on the other. [With one side telling us that CO2 might kill us all and the other side telling us that CO2 might not kill anyone, thank the good Lord we have lukewarmers to conclude that CO2 might kill half of us?]

Over the five years since Al Gore joined KPCB to promote environmentally-correct “green tech” investments, the results have been pretty dismal. According to VentureSource, of the more than 60 companies that have received KPCB equity backing, only three have been acquired or merged into other companies. And since the time Gore joined KPCB, only two have managed to go public. Shareholders of one, Amyris, Inc. a biomass company, have lost 80% of their value since the firm’s 2010 IPO. The other, Enphase Energy which went public last March, was listed by the Wall Street Journal in December as the worst IPO of the year.